English

The English Department at Willington follows the National Curriculum for England & Wales, incorporating the demands of the ISEB Common Entrance Examination and the various requirements of senior schools’ own examinations, including those at Scholarship level.

Lessons are intended to stimulate each child’s natural creative enthusiasm. In Senior School English, comprehension skills, literary analysis, writing-to-purpose and creative writing, are taught through studied texts. These include plays, fiction, non-fiction, autobiography and poetry. Several outings to theatres and literary events throughout the boys' time at Willington complement the classroom-based teaching. National writing competitions and various extra-curricular clubs support and further complement classroom activities.

In order to promote and encourage reading for pleasure, the English Department has an effective scheme in place to which all senior and junior boys subscribe. This ensures that private reading is ongoing and complementary to the class text, enabling the boys to make links between the ideas contained in the studied text and those in their own novel.

This approach is central to the Department’s philosophy of texts as a means of expressing and deconstructing accepted cultural norms. As such, it is effective in developing the skills of question and challenge, which are crucial to literary analysis throughout each child’s academic career. It is the intellectually demanding and dynamic nature of English at Willington, combined with the support of the specialist English teachers, that sees our boys make excellent progress in Literacy at Willington.